![]() ![]() Actual female-on-female friendship, at least in mainstream movies, rarely goes beyond the stock feisty-best-friend-of-heroine character, and if it does, it inevitably includes giggling and shrieking, which has become shorthand for lifelong bonds (one recent exception: the young-people half of last year’s The Life Before Her Eyes, a movie that doesn’t work built around a central friendship that absolutely does). Male buddy comedies come along every few weeks, but ladies are often stuck with buddies-who-are-guys-and-also-secretly-their-true-loves comedies, which have the distinct disadvantage of usually not being very funny. When she returns home to suburban Los Angeles, she seems to only ever see her male best friend and her female rival, both college acquaintances who also hover around the L.A. What the movie lacks - apart from the laughs it fumbles through TV-ish pauses in what might’ve been funny dialogue on the page - is a believable social system for Bledel’s character, Ryden. Post-Grad isn’t particularly observant or knowledgeable - when its heroine aspires to get a job at the prestigious best publishing house in, um, Los Angeles, the movie neglects to make any jokes about how little she must know about publishing - but it stirs a decent mix of confusion, bad job interviews, and watching others succeed. This role won’t turn me into an Alexis Bledel believer, but she is at least well-suited to playing someone who looks a little bit lost - you know, like Malin Akerman in Watchmen, but less naked. She reverses that time-honored tradition of youngish actors looking far too old to play their teenage parts: she is twenty-seven, and with her tentative gawkiness still can’t convince playing beyond sixteen or so. A further handicap comes from Bledel, who had enough trouble carrying one quarter of a movie in the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants series. I guess this is in turn because Noah Baumbach’s Kicking and Screaming is arguably my favorite movie, but at the same time, that film sets an unreasonably high standard of intelligence and hilarity unlikely to be matched by a Shark Tale co-director. I saw Post-Grad, now coming to the end of its theatrical run, because I’m a bit of a sucker for movies about post-education ennui. They seem like pretty incompatible viewing but wind up united by their interest in the lives of young women - and how close they come to getting things right while still managing to not quite work. The other night I caught the squeaky Alexis Bledel vehicle Post-Grad followed by the grimy Rob Zombie remake-sequel Halloween II.
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